Land of our fathers

My father’s house sits on a parcel of land first described in an 1851 abstract, 3 years after statehood and half a century after the Iowa Territory rounded out the Louisiana Purchase. 160 acres were given to Anna F Strong , “mother and heir at law,” under an act of Congress, signed all the way to President Fillmore “to raise for a limited time an additional military force.” Her son, Private, Third Regiment, US Infantry, did not survive our war on Mexico.

First European settlers arrived in 1833 from back east, but decades passed before for owners lived on this patch. Orlin Oatman, Anna’s assignee, died in Buffalo and left it to his wife Sarah who married George Washburn who sold it Stevenson Burk; wife, name of Parthenia P, sold her dower share for $200. New immigrants pushed west on land newly “cleared” of Indians, planting in the deep black soil. Railroads sped up the pace to the Pacific. The Barrows and the Messengers each bought half the tract and in 1931 charged Arnest Lopata $10 to string electric poles overhead. Then, resident owners removed squatters, or landed farmers, depending how you look at it, and after the second war the land was scissored into patches, sold to developers. They annexed it to the city, laid streets, ran water, and carved Anna Strong’s inheritance into lots young families could mortgage from the Bohemian Savings and Loan. Split foyers sprouted on soilless, treeless tracts, waiting to grow up into neighborhoods. The house that sits on Lot 8 is the house my father built.

A “For Sale” sign sits in the front lawn of my father’s house today. Sudanese refugees live on one side and Mormons rent on the other. What next page will the abstract write?

Westward ho

R52 from Holbrook to Parnell, across the Iowa River Valley, was called the Black Diamond, still is north of Old Man’s Creek. In 1832 the Black Hawk Treaty with the Sac and Fox Indians plowed the way for west-moving settlers following deep along creeks and riverbeds, keeping timber and water by their side. During the 40’s and 50’s, hungry Irish immigrants heeded the adverts to rich farmlands and named towns names that are no more: Armah, Hinkeltown, Green Valley, Lytle City.

There is vastness in the Greene Township, every ditch, every S curve in the road named and remembered. Folks talk about the south side of the field, turning north on route R and east on the Black Diamond. Mapped routes are gravel, and I knew full well a dozen pairs of eyes watched behind curtains as a dusty vehicle crawled up Naughton Street to Hatter Ave to St Joseph’s, quiet as the grave on Easter Sunday. Although the younger, Parnell’s lonely church is scheduled for demolition in June.

Squint, and see what brought so many from Wicklow and Meath and Dunmore to these low hills, highwater creeks, thousands of miles from their rotting homeland. Tucked into safe country, anchored, far far from any sea, with the accumulation of acres, the least liquid and most valuable of assets, their future. 120 acres to start, a marriage brings 80, a clever purchase another 100, and families lend the lot to the next generation as they borrowed from the last.

Surrounded by ghost towns, nearly one itself, Holbrook is a place of souls, living and dead. St Michael’s cemetery, where my grandmother’s people rest, shows a new wound in its side. Soon an old woman pauses her car, steps into a brutal wind, stares into the hole and crosses herself.

Men older than my father remember their old folks minding the march across the Black Diamond when records and regalia were taken from the old capitol in Iowa City – too remote – to a new home in Des Moines, shortly after statehood. Irish farmers stopped their digging, looked up from their new fields and saw the stately procession, ignominiously stuck upon the road that very first night, a load heavier than anticipated.

Irish Sighs

Now is the silly season in Boston. Except for mold, there isn’t enough green to upholster a pillow, but plenty of faux emerald on the endcaps in Stop and Shop. And nutty hats. Guinness is the maddest haberdasher, planting fixtures like fireplugs atop the suburban public which, it appears, has just discovered drink.

From famine era to current frivolity, the Irish have contributed mightily to our city: presidents, playwrights, mayors and mafia, a checkered achievement. And, once landed on these shores, wasted no time in beating the tar out of the next wave of newcomers, in good American fashion.

Yet, like the rest of our immigrant nation, they were once scared and hungry. The woman who saved us sailed three months to the new world. Her dowry, a featherbed coverlet tatted by the nuns, rests in my closet in an 1841 brick boarding house run by a succession of Irish dears giving succor and chowder to seamen, before demon drink and the harbor harlots robbed them blind.

I looked up on this when-will-it-stop late winter grey afternoon and saw that flag, big as a mainmast and thin as water, unfurled in the vault of the Boston Harbor Hotel, flapping in the cold Lenten wind, waving its tricolors out to sea, past the Graves Light, where immigrants from countless towns and countries passed the rocky ledge in horror, past the Harbor Islands that hid the Irish mob’s monkey business and gun running, out past Finn’s Ledge, which drowned the crew of the Mary E O’Hara, and no one could save them, a hundred miles past East Boston where, in 1860, 600 who smelled land were lifted off the sinking Connaught, two months out of Galway, past George’s Bank and deep waters where those who tried and failed or were turned back sleep in the cold dark sea.

From coffin boat to Irish cruises, immigrants to emigrants returning, McNamara to Mack, the full circle of migration plays a sweet and mournful song.

Negative balance

When the Red Line crosses the Salt and Pepper Bridge, you get that glorious view, Beacon Hill shouldering Back Bay stretching to Kenmore Square, lined on the edge of an ice-jammed Charles. The sight has to cheer, especially midweek midafternoon on a trip to book Mecca, Harvard Square. Underground to Kendall (they have books) and Central Square (2 or 3 stores) - and then grey settled as I emerged into daylight. Cherry Chinese lanterns lining Mass Ave for the New Year couldn’t lift the gloom.

And it hit me – the bank to bookstore ratio, down from nearly 30 shops when I was young, long before Abercrombie met Fitch. The robber barons and their brats have squeezed the books out of the Square, and they wouldn't give you the price of an overdue library fine.

The question remains: who reads and what do we read - tea leaves, tweets, tv guides. And why we don’t read: the tragic legion (growing) of those who can’t, and those who won’t (sorrier still) and those who will not anymore. So little time, I suppose. ‘Souvenirs’ of culture are stacked 8 deep next to my bed, and a dozen more queue in my head…who am I kidding?

Maybe a quarter of a million books were published last year, and here we are making more. Just a couple dozen each year, and good books, but more books, and fewer eyes to see. Well, let there be a bounty, more than we can consume. Welcome more than we can ever read so the world has no known boundary. My sin is too many books, and I am guilty.

Mao and Mozart

Since 1799, the Peabody Essex has boasted its Asian loot, booty from Salem’s wealthiest merchants, plying the China trade. In 2009, the Mahjong exhibit brings treasures from the old world full circle.

As China develops a brisk art market, subversive works of contemporary artists and social critics are pulling down millions. Riveting are the silly, smiling, identical statues of Yue Min Jun, their repetitious grin a hah! to individuality. More mind-blowing is Cao Fei’s vision of urban mess perched on an island idyll, manufactured in Second Life. The half-submerged shopping cart of skyscrapers off its shore made it for me. And I found a strange attraction to Yin Zhaoyang’s huge “Ode to Joy” - Tiananmen Square at night, glittery, celebratory, masses of people, anonymous and fuzzy. In this gorgeous painting of a killing ground, loaded with crushing memories, there is, to my surprise, (my horror?) a palpable excitement. Our hotel was just there, Kris pointed and mused on the Forbidden City.

Maybe that’s art’s forward message: something new comes from an image or a sound locked in sentiment and symbolism…how about that Marilyn Monroe Mao?...and brings the world alive again, in pain and imperfect, human. Here, on this site of carnage and outrage, a living breathing square full of people, looking up. Fireworks!

So, on this winter afternoon in symphony hall, in that familiar second movement of “Jupiter,” I heard, for the first time, the strings pounding down a pulse. A human heart under the melody. Mozart may not have lived long enough to hear it, but I did.

eBook Epiphany

Tim O’Reilly’s “Tools of Change” conference this week brought together an odd assortment of messianic bombasts (you need’em), suited executives (in or out of work, hard to tell), an agent or two (what’s the real royalty on an eBook), technology wizards with the latest apps, the coolest devices and, in some cases, an extraordinary idea. The contrasts were high, with barely a mention of the economic crisis in a week that saw Harper decimated. Some parts verged on Dadaism: The cost of free. A print-on-demand Gutenberg. Reverse publishing. Who needs a publisher anyway? The book is dead; long live the book.

At a show like this, there is plenty of room for the one-off wonders, the get-rich-quick schemes, debates over digital pricing. In a corral full of backpacks and iPhone holsters, vendor pitches not-so thinly disguised as talks, the questions bounced between improving the world, ending poverty, giving access, and finding that illusive buck on the web.

And, for me, there were transcendent moments. The young open source wizard describing a new world order for his daughter. The deeply thoughtful social software designer with a presentation full of Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Dopplr, iTunes and last.fm all in the service of elegant thought. With sweeping, arching ideas about community and access (“Think service not sale.”), building relationships (author + reader + publisher), and the grace of human connection, Gavin Bell quietly reminded us that we call them (us) readers, not users.

Tower of Babel indeed, with an occasional balcony from which to survey the sky.

Art and Science

All the same, winter is the best time for stars in Boston. Betelgeuse, Rigel, Capella and box of the brightest hang from the Great Hexagon and light up the cold night. It’s ironic that we’re Gemma, the jewel in a summer constellation, high in the sky off the Herdsman's shoulder in the dimmer half of the year.

This week the winter sky shone like ice on tarmac over Fan Pier, where we looked at Shepard Fairey’s absurd work in our new art institute. Best known for skateboards, OBEY GIANT street campaigns and that Barack Obama t-shirt, his first showing in a major museum raises the question: does mainstream acceptance tarnish an avant-garde glow? But the best part of the evening was the tiny couple arguing their way through the exhibit. Rather, she was arguing, right out loud. He was unmoved; we were shocked. And Catherine said, maybe it’s performance art. Maybe part of a plan to keep the artist's edge sharp. Who can tell where art begins or ends?

Art is perception.

One of the joys of my adulthood was discovering a pattern to the night sky. Steady constellations, phases of the moon and planets in constant progression. Light and shadow and the colors of the stars thrill me, as they have moved generation after generation. Art, I suppose.